Being an entrepreneur seldom comes with a handbook!

My name is Sukhi Jutla, in the following weeks I will share my journey as an entrepreneur with you, and hopefully, inspire you, London based Female Founders, to keep going with your business and find the support you deserve!

I said Bye Bye to ten years of a stable corporate job.

In 2016, after a decade of working a corporate job, I made the decision to pursue my dream of being the boss of my own business: MarketOrders. The leap was breathtakingly exhilarating, exciting and scary.

Exhilarating because I was now working on something that I was passionate about. Exciting because I was learning something new every day. Scary because being an entrepreneur seldom comes with a handbook.

Most of the time you are trying to figure things out along the way. Being an entrepreneur is akin to being a problem solver. And the solver of lots of problems including those that come from the challenges of building a business, serving your customers and ensuring you have the right networks and suppliers. Yet this is what is so exciting about the journey. You are always learning and being challenged.

Nothing prepares you for the reality of running your own business!

Even though I had prepared as much as I could to transition from being an employee to an entrepreneur, nothing quite prepares you for the reality of running your own business and in particular, the challenges that come from being a female founder.

The first 2 years of my business journey were all about learning to get to grips with my business model, understand the needs of my customers and recruiting a team.

I bootstrapped the business with my co-founder for the first 2 years but there came a point in our journey where we needed an injection of cash to take the business to the next scale.

In addition, I now had a team of 4 people and I had to learn about how to effectively lead a team, how to put in process and structures into the organisation and understanding what it took to scale. I was now facing new challenges that I needed help to overcome in order for my business to continue to grow and thrive.

I found the support I needed to grow.

It was at this point I knew I needed some help and guidance from a fresh pair of eyes. As the saying goes, what you seek, also seeks you! And this is how I came to join the Hatch Female Founders Accelerator.

I needed help on how to raise investment, how to market more effectively and how to pitch and present my business. I needed business support in terms of business coaching as well as knowledge on certain areas and access to mentors and networks that I didn’t know were available. And these are the primary reasons for why I joined the Hatch Female Founders Accelerator (FFA).

MarketOrders won £100,000 seed investment as well as 6 months sponsored workspace at WeWork as well as £20,000 worth of private mentoring and global connections from world-class entrepreneurs from GeniusU.

I was facing so many challenges, as we all do when we onboard this journey, right?

The programme is a great mix of business training, expert support and coaching to help me to accelerate my business growth. In 4-month I was able to develop my own unique set of superpowers to successfully grow my business.

We were a small group of 15 smart, exceptional hand-picked women. We were able to build and cultivate a supportive community and safe space to ask questions and to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in a safe environment.

Only 33% of women believe in their own capacity when starting a business compared to 50% of men.

The FFA programme has supercharged my business as well as my entrepreneurial abilities.

The coaching and business support I received gave me the confidence to know I could grow and scale my business to the heights I want.

During the course of the programme I went on to receive 3 industry recognized awards and this was in part thanks to the confidence and courage I was able to develop whilst on the programme.

I am amazed at the new boundaries and frontiers I have pushed, the comfort barrier I have sent tumbling down and seen myself grow from strength to strength with the help and support of the Hatch FFA.

Sukhi Jutla left a decade of corporate life to become a serial entrepreneur and the author of 3 books. She is the Founder of MarketOrders, the online marketplace for gold jewellery and diamonds.
As a Female Tech Ambassador, Sukhi is a regular keynote speaker and passionate about supporting female entrepreneurship. She is an IBM Blockchain Foundation Developer and her efforts have been recognised by a number of industry awards including the Asian Women of Achievement Awards, We Are The City Rising Stars Award and listed as one of the Top 100 Asian Stars in UK Tech. In April 2018 Sukhi made global headlines when she became the World’s First #1 Bestselling ‘Blockchain’ Author.